


The Echo

by joinedbackatthemargin



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: "post-"canon where "post-" is from the Protagonist's/the world's perspective, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Neil isn't Max, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:22:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28566141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joinedbackatthemargin/pseuds/joinedbackatthemargin
Summary: They stopped, and Wheeler put her hands into the pockets, considering. “Well, no. You can do pretty impressive stuff while only knowing the basics. But it’ll only do you good trying.”She said that like she had a specific person in mind, like she was a witness. And Neil understood. He understood that it was a story that started its pinwheeling in a past where he was absent; from then on, many things were better to keep as secrets, and he had to earn trust if he wanted to have it.(Yet another retelling of what happened post-film)
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	The Echo

He remembered seeing him for the first time, after he had started to work in the organization due to a curious chain of coincidences. He met his future handler in his office, which, compared to other rooms in the centre, was small and old, all about practicality. Neil remembered himself eyeing the filing cabinet by the wall, a kind of faded greyish green straight out of the 90s, in an almost disconcerting contrast to the computer before him. He knew that this person in front of him was not someone who’d choose to stay in the past, considering he was leading an organization that dealt with the literal time itself. Then, there must be a reason why, he remembered himself thinking, he'd choose to stay – and sometimes even sleep, as he learnt after some time – in this painfully narrow box with a dusty, medium-sized window instead of the profligate window walls that defined the rest of the centre building, like he was somehow punishing himself, or memorialising a past.

His future boss looked at him and smiled as a greeting. He told him to sit down.

“Time,” was the first word he said to Neil. “How familiar are you with it?”

And the question was startling even if he’d prepared for it. He had spent his time in college (he just went _out_ of it) practically waiting for this moment, ever since Ives first contacted him. But in his mind, it’d be more scientific, more like the jargon-filled papers he had to read. That question, however, wasn’t like those. He stared into the man’s – a complete stranger for Neil at the moment – eyes and suddenly realised, and at the same time, acknowledged, that this man wouldn’t understand a word if he talked about how our universe has defined a thermodynamic law of increasing entropy, which was still in the realm of “the basic stuff”, as his professor called it.

He felt disappointed. But the man was still waiting for him to answer, so he thought about it.

“I know about it,” he settled on.

The man laughed, much to his surprise. “Oh, I know you do. You have a master’s in physics, and all that,” he said. “And that’s part of the reason why we need you.”

His tone had an uninterpretable depth to it, but Neil interpreted it anyway, and knew from instinct that he was interpreting it wrong, but he was taught physics in college, not mindreading, and he decided that he had every right to feel offended.

“Yeah, if you know it already, you’ll know that question is trivial,” he retorted, knowing it wasn’t true, “time is just a variable, most of the time.”

Which wasn’t exactly how you should talk to your prospective superior. He gave himself a brief second to think about taking that back. But when he risked a glance up, he saw the man’s eyes regarding him with curiosity, somehow not as hurt as he’d expected. The man didn’t say anything and stood up, a hand sweeping up something like a driving glove from the table, and putting it on.

“Step aside.”

He obeyed, and the older man raised his gloved hand.

“Watch closely,” he said.

He made a gesture telling Neil to look in front of him, where the cabinet stood. A metal door on the cabinet was stuck in the compartment behind it, as if someone pushed it too hard instead of pulling it, making it contorted beyond repair; something was in the compartment in front of the door, as if it was carelessly stuffed inside. The man’s hand stilled in the air for a moment, and in that split second Neil thought the other man was hesitating; but there was a shuddering anticipation in the room as if some sort of violation was looming, which he wouldn’t register until the moment passed.

Then, he heard a terrible noise. It was a wink of the eye; it was as if an inconsequential proportion of universe winked with him; and the metal door was repaired – _no, not repaired_ , he heard a voice in his mind say, _it was destroyed inversely_ , as his quick physicist mind figured it out before his consciousness did – and at the same time something flew out of the compartment, into the man’s hand with another softer but equally eery sound.

“What was that?” he asked weakly.

“The noise?” the older man answered as he showed Neil what was in his hand: a gas mask. “That’s a clash, but a reverse one.”

That sentence was enough to provide an explanation to everything, as he played back the process, while all the things that his subconscious had categorised as “not right” started to surface and fall into place – the bizarre trajectory of the mask, the de-damaged door, and the brief, sure and intricate movement of the hand. He breathed as epiphany struck.

“Macroscopic time-reversal,” he heard his own voice, “of something as complex as a gas mask. We – we’re told it’s still not possible.”

“Well,” he probably thought Neil couldn’t notice it, but Neil did, that the way he muttered the response was as if he suddenly thought of something really laughable, a hilarious but inopportune coincidence, and he couldn’t really look at the younger man’s eyes. “Try and keep up, then.”

He walked past Neil to put the mask into a safe. Neil turned to face him. “I see what you’re implying,” he said bluntly. “No, I’m not. Familiar with time, I mean.”

The man glanced at him, surprised. “That’s not what I was implying,” he said.

“But it is what I meant,” Neil told him. “I’m a physicist, an amateur mathematician for that matter, but I’ve never really experienced anything backward. You’re recruiting me to be a field agent of some sort, from what I gather. I don’t think theoretical understanding, or at least partial understanding, is gonna be… an advantage.”

The other person in the conversation fell silent. His eyes were careful, stubborn, refusing to expose a single bit of emotion. He seemed contemplating.

“Look,” finally he said. “You’re here for a special mission. What it is, I cannot tell you for the moment, but it’s related to what you just saw. It was about the world’s flow in the measure of time, and what can happen if we move forward or backward in it, if we accept or violate the rules of it. And for that…” he stopped, looking for the right words, “the theory is as important as the experience, let’s say.”

“But my theory probably isn’t enough, is it?”

“It is,” the man said quietly. “In fact, I myself was… helped, once, by someone like you. So I have faith in you. If,” he hastened to add, “you want to do this, of course. You’re free to go if you don’t.”

Neil wasn’t sure what was happening. His pauses were subtle, but Neil was good enough to catch them. He just didn’t look like someone who tended to stutter, and Neil wondered what made him hesitate. There was something complicated in it, something that made no sense to assume. It sounded like he almost didn’t want him to take the job. Neil decided not to consider it for the moment, because – he realised with some surprise – he _wanted_ to do it, because –

“That implies you do have the experience, sir,” he said, excitement surging through him, “do you?”

To his surprise, the man grinned at him. “you’ll never guess,” he said, standing up and offering a hand.

Years after that, Neil would recall that moment, when he was twenty-three standing in his nominal handler’s office shaking hands with him. It was a solely professional handshake, nothing special, but when Neil thought back about it, about that day – you know how sometimes two distinct and unrelated memories return like two trains arrive at the same station, and suddenly you make the connection and everything clicks? – and he’d remember another day in his teenage years; after his mother’s death, or as his grandmother put it in the obituary, “left after the steps of her beloved”, he went into the study and saw Grandma holding her daughter’s wedding ring to the window. He knew the ring was a gift from Grandma, twenty years ago from then. He saw Grandma’s eyes, and she didn’t cry, she just looked at the ring without looking _at_ it, as if she was looking into a more substantial entity in its reflection, trying to tell a sound from its echo. And that day, he saw the same flicker in the man’s eyes. He touched his hand as if he had touched it in some distant past.

At that time Neil failed to register it (because the older man was damn good at hiding; because Neil was young, naïve, and couldn’t read the other one like a book yet), which was probably for the best.

The first time he inverted, it was a weird experience. The dizziness was sudden, almost knocking him out. He forced his mind to scream _calm down_ to the other body parts. He knew it was just all his senses feeling confused, and it should be over within a few minutes. It took shorter than that, only several deep breaths through his mask. They had had training before this, in a simulator where everything was holographic and reversed; but still, this was so much reminiscent of the first time, where he was presented a puzzle both expected and unexpected.

“Are you okay?” Wheeler’s voice came through the speaker. He cast a glimpse at her from the corner of his eye.

“Yes,” he said, a little out of breath, “I think I am.”

“Any sickness? Nausea? Cold Sweat? Vertigo?”

“None of them.”

“Good.” In front of him, Wheeler led his eyes to a gun lying on the ground. “Now try to pick that up.”

He took a deep breath, because it was easy and it wasn’t: he’d done this a million times before, with his handler by his side watching him. He knew it was him who dropped the gun there, at least from the gun’s perspective; but it was different, when he really entered a world of mirrored motions after he'd made himself specular. A voice in his head counted down, too calmly and too fast: three, two, one – he dropped the Glock 19; the gun dropped upwards into his hands.

“There’s a target on the building wall on your left. Clear your bullets.”

He turned and saw the target, smiling as he realised the ironic humour in the words “clear your bullets”. He fired six times, completing the _causa sine qua non_ although it had happened before this, knowing that from his and Wheeler’s point of view bullets were returning to the magazine, retrieving low entropy.

“Excellent work,” Wheeler said. She took away the gun from Neil’s hand, throwing it to another person in mask. “All you need to do now is to get used to it.”

He huffed an unsteady laugh, running a hand through his own hair. “Is it necessary?” he asked, “because I’m pretty uncertain as to whether I can really get used to anything about this.”

They stopped, and Wheeler put her hands into the pockets, considering. “Well, no. You can do pretty impressive stuff while only knowing the basics. But it’ll only do you good trying.”

She said that like she had a specific person in mind, like she was a witness. And Neil understood. He understood that it was a story that started its pinwheeling in a past where he was absent; from then on, many things were better to keep as secrets, and he had to earn trust if he wanted to have it. Plus, from the expressions of Wheeler, Ives and his handler when they sometimes talked, and when the conversation intruded the realm of it they would stop for a while, before continuing to pussyfoot with wariness through it, even when they didn’t know Neil was listening, Neil knew it was an erstwhile darkness on the prowl that they tried not to call by its very name. So he chose to be wise and not to bring it up.

But sometimes mysteries were overwhelming, one of them being his handler’s name. Their relationship seemed to deviate from the usual routes of professionalism, as Neil was apparently the only person he dealt with in missions and training. They became almost-friends, after a lot of things. Friendship was almost automatic when you shared the same big secret. And one day, in a small cocktail party, he asked him:

“You know – isn’t it strange that I never know your name?”

He dropped the “sir”, as they were off work. His handler made a non-committal sound that he didn’t quite catch.

“What?”

He leaned in, and saw his face, and in his face there was something, and it was like suppression of some really strong emotion, and apparently it was recurring enough to make the man suppress it with nonchalant expertise.

“It’s just difficult to think we haven’t met for that long,” the man told him.

That sentence made him feel confused but warm inside, because that was an admission, if not declaration, of friendship, right? “You skipped the formal introduction, when you recruited me.”

“Did I?” Now there was some genuine incredulity in the voice, but it resumed composure quickly after. “I’m not a man of red tapes – if you haven’t gathered,” and the amusement in it sounded somewhat feigned, but the self-deprecation didn’t. And it ended there, a – corroboration, of some sort, that Neil was important. He still didn’t tell him his name, for some reason; and it must be for the same reason that Neil let it slide at that time.

But he did tell him his name, three years later, after he had trained him himself for shooting, for combat, and brought him to missions. That day, there was a turnstile in midnight Shanghai; an hour later, he collapsed aside a souvenir stand before a closed storefront, and it was brought to the ground with him in a deafening clatter. When he woke up, he found himself lying in a bed with discoloured peony patterns on it, and the room smelt of dust and faintly of someone’s childhood. A tight-lipped gentleman stood up from his bedside; he turned on the light when he left the room. Neil drifted into sleep, again.

When he opened his eyes again, it was already dawn. Beside his bed was now him. Neil tried sitting up, but ended up only trying but not _up_ at all. Hissing in frustration, Neil looked at him from the corner of his eyes.

“We’re in Astrid’s Apartments,” he said, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, “locals call it the Nanchang Building. The man who was in this room before, his wife’s one of our people in Asia.”

“What happened?”

“You’re hit by an inverted bullet in the abdomen. Dangerous stuff. Could be devastating; it spreads faster than regular wounds.”

“Radiation,” Neil heard his own voice – it was so hoarse it sounded like a whimper – and then a sigh from beside him. The other man was relieved he didn’t need to explain all the inverted tech, he thought.

“Well, not anymore.” His periphery caught a bright glimmer; a glass of water was by his lips the next moment. He sipped from it, grateful.

“You sent me back into the turnstile for one more time,” he turned his head to smile at him, trying – without knowing he was trying – to reassure, “yeah?”

“Correct.” The other man said, smiling back. A hesitant twist of the lips, but it was there. “Glad to see you catch up so quickly.”

There was that glint in his eyes again, almost in memoriam. Then Neil realised that every mystery here was about one specific memory, a past event that was either painful and fresh or an ever-echoing trauma that couldn’t fade; he knew for a fact that everything would have an answer if he found out the memory in question. And it was related to him, he thought, more of an intuition than a deduction. The silence would be inexplicable otherwise; so, the only thing he needed to do was to wait for this man beside him to break this silence one day. He would be told his mission, and he would be told the story.

And then, the man lowered his head, and uttered one word.

It was slurred, consonants emulsifying into vowels. But Neil understood, with a kind of certainty that had seldom come to him ever since he joined Tenet, that it was the man’s name.

* * *

That night, Neil noticed an odd thing in the other man’s clenched fist. “What’re you holdin’,” he croaked while he tried again to sleep. The man looked down, and muttered an _oh_ , uncurling his fingers to reveal the object. In the first beams of light of the morning, Neil saw it through squinted eyes. It was a tiny metal disc, a red string going through the hole in the middle of it, ends of the string connected in a neatly tied knot.

“It was at the souvenir stand,” the man said. “You grabbed this from the shelf when you fell. You were holding it and wouldn’t let go. I managed to get it out when we arrived here and you fell asleep the second time.”

“Maybe it’s a good luck charm, don’t you think?”

His handler laughed. “I thought you were the scientist here.”

Neil hummed. He tried to tell him that he didn’t believe in good luck charms, but he believed in himself, in how he had held on to it as though it was the only thing he would have – and that could mean nothing, just the biology of his muscles under the conditions, but he skipped some classes in college and went to lectures on poetry instead, and he knew the power of symbolism. That he wanted it because he knew it was the closest witness of his near-death fall, and, on top of that, of the moment when the man took it out from his hands, when their fingers most certainly touched, and it was something he had missed in his dreams. But he didn’t, because he was exhausted, because it sounded personal, desperate, and juvenile.

He said, eventually: “I think I’ll keep it anyway.”

The other man didn’t respond. When Neil glanced sideways at him, the man’s expression was of a complicated, twisted kind.

“Hey,” Neil said. He didn’t know what gave him the courage, but he reached out a hand; and the other man took it, almost without hesitation. “I’ll be alive.”

“I know,” came the answer, cool and low, and there was no grief, devoid of what his eyes had shown seconds ago, but Neil knew him well enough to see it through. “I know.” The man repeated. And it was as if _that_ brought him pain, too. But what? The fact that Neil would be alive? Or the fact that he knew?

It didn’t make sense, and Neil was too tired for it. He sank back to sleep.

Five months after, at Meiringen station, Neil put down the English crossword puzzle book he brought with him from the hotel, raising his head to see the man walking towards him, with a scarf that somehow matched Neil’s shirt; it was at this exact second that Neil realised he had fallen for the man ever since the mission where he almost died, and his heart made a tender, resigned whine. How amazing a man’s mind can be at compartmentalising, Neil thought vaguely, as he greeted the man with the correct amount of enthusiasm, before they dived into discussion. Every unmindful passer-by would assume it was just two friends meeting at a railway station.

“How’s life in Switzerland?” The man asked as a greeting.

Neil lowered his head. “Could be shorter,” he said, curtly.

“Not enjoying yourself?”

“No, no, everything’s fine. Just – alone.” And it came out so naturally, a kind of courage he didn’t know he had. He looked up, and the older man smiled a little, lopsided, cautious, as if he couldn’t be sure. “Burkhalter” – the man with inverted weapons he was here to deal with – “won’t cause any problems from now on. Our people were still investigating the rest of his business partners, one or two, but that should be done within weeks.” He changed the topic, cutting straight into the business.

“Excellent job, Neil.” He said, and for a moment he seemed wistful, wanting to say more. But when he spoke again his tone was even: “After this is finished, we need you to come back to the centre.”

The word _need_ was enunciated in such a way that Neil got it right away. “Is this about,” he started carefully, then his mind said _forget it_ and jumped right into it. “the special mission you mentioned when you recruited me?”

The man opened his mouth, and closed it again.

“Yes,” he said. “So brace up.”

So Neil braced up.

And when they started the mission, when weeks after weeks the plan slowly consolidated and presented itself – Neil knew.

During that stage, they spent some weeks in San Diego. The last day of their stay, after everything there’d been taken care of, they sat in their suite in Grand Hyatt, looking out at the summer water from the window. “You’d think we can avoid it,” Neil said. His own voice was more self-mocking than he was expecting. “If we don’t – if we do things differently.”

The man made a noise from the back of his throat, a choking sound. Neil snapped his eyes back at him, startled, but the noise had stopped when he looked at the man’s face. The man looked back with a sort of intensity, but he didn’t cry; he just started to waver.

“You have a faith,” the man said. “In the mechanics of the universe.”

It startled him, because he did. If his education in physics told him anything, it was _what’s happened's happened_ , and it was a choice of free will. He’ll choose it, and so it’ll happen _after_ it, for him, from his perspective. The only thing that was unfair in this, Neil thought, was the other man. Because for the man, Neil was dead. An echo from the tomb, a happiness that would reflect – _had_ reflected – back as agony ten times greater. He didn't tell Neil this, for a reason that was not hard to understand, but Neil knew, as there were so many clues before this, and he had processed them to reach the inevitable conclusion. And it was a lot; but it made sense. It made sense, therefore it was not a hard truth.

“What else do you know about me that I haven’t told you myself?” He joked.

“Not much,” the man said. He mused for a while, and amended. “Not enough.”

Yes, same; you were still a mystery, to me, even after you became my friend, Neil thought. And there were nights in the office where they chose to be silent, as they sometimes did, because the night was quiet, and it was overwhelming, the darkening silence so thick that no words could cut through. Every night like that, Neil would think of the day they first met, would think of the question, _how familiar are you with time?_ And then, he realised that the question was not ignorant but tired, the indication of a man that wasn’t incapable of understanding the physical monstrosity that was the time, but rather chose not to understand it.

They were in the man’s office on the last day; Neil looked out of the window and saw night. He took a glance around the room, and when he drank in the sight of – of decrepitude and longing, the belated realisation rang out echoing in his mind that the man wasn’t staying in the past. On the contrary; his life was _for_ a past, that had happened years before this, that was happening right now.

“This,” he said, turning back his head to watch the man tie the little red string on his rucksack from the corner of his eye, “is goodbye, then.”

A second later, the man was in front of him again. “No, it isn’t.” His voice was focused, and – Neil would even say – amused. “Technically.”

Neil shook his head. “This is all messed up, all missed opportunities,” and he couldn’t help it but grin, because he knew how he was going to do this.

It was a good kiss. And when they parted, the man stared at him in disbelief, like it was something so unexpected, and Jesus, he thought he was being very, very obvious already, wasn’t he? But then, the older man just threw back his head, laughing. Neil never heard him laugh like this before, and it was – he laughed with him – an adorable sound.

“You see?” he said, gathering his breath because this was a first time for him, the kiss, kind of like the recruitment, like his first inversion, and first times were always scary. “I mean, it’s all messed up because once I move back, the low entropy will be my perspective of the future, and I’ll remember this high-entropy future as my past. But you’ll move on with a mostly linear memory; your general perception of time accords with this universe, and my future was your past – do you see how wrecked this is?”

Then Neil realised that was a stupid question, because of course he saw how wrecked this was – he saw it, years ago, with his own eyes. So Neil hugged him. He knew he needed one even though he wouldn’t show it. In that hug they kissed again, and Neil said what he was really trying to say, at the moment, by the other man’s lips in an almost inaudible whisper:

“Dig out that memory, and try to think of it as a future. Will you?”

Because that would be how I perceive it. Because that would be much less painful to think. He heard a sob, from the space between them – it was himself. Neil started to cry.

Five minutes later, he stepped back to look at the other’s face. The man’s eyes were red, and he seemed unable to speak.

“I’ll…” he was hesitant when he did speak. And then he shook his head. “When you go b– go there, you’ll see that I was… not aware of this. I mean, I wasn’t aware of the future. I can’t tell you much. Ignorance –”

“– is our ammunition, yeah. Suppress. I understand.”

And it wasn’t sad, not at all. The man walked with him until the turnstile was just before them, a hundred yard away.

“Goodbye,” the man said. “I will –” and Neil smiled because he put a very slight emphasis on the word _will_ , because he said _will_ instead of _would_ or _did_ – “see you at the beginning.”

Neil held him, one last time, his name on the tip of his tongue. The man looked at him, a ponderous coda. The moment before Neil walked into the turnstile, he glanced back, to see, to memorialise the man’s face.

And that last moment, when he ran away into the deserted land, he would understand that there was a second – or first, matter of perspective, but always final – departure, where he didn’t glance back at all. It was the best choice, albeit a cruel one: they had a world to save. And before that, in his long, long journey back, he had the time to think about everything. He thought about poetry and symbolism. He saw the circle, the torus, everywhere, in the little ornament on his rucksack, in his grandmother’s ring. He thought about his life: a ring on the finger of the protagonist’s lifetime; protagonist, because only he could tell the story. And he heard the echo, everywhere, and realised with wonderment that his life was an echo in those eyes of the man all along. That Neil appeared twice in his life, and disappeared twice, like the echoing of a goodbye. That for him, Neil was an echo, and for them both, love was an echo.

He wished him a life without greater sorrow, before he entered the building. He spotted him, younger, with a grim expression, sitting in an armchair. The echo began, buzzing as he sat down beside him, reaching out a hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a physicist, which very embarrassingly shows in this fic. (some little alterations on Feb 17, 2021)


End file.
